1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a flexible emitter and a method for fabricating the same, and more particularly, to a method of fabricating a flexible emitter using a high molecular compound.
2. Description of the Related Art
Flexible displays are revolutionary paper-like displays that can be folded or rolled without damage. Due to high portability, the flexible displays emerge as one of the promising next-generation displays. Organic electro-luminescence (EL) devices or field emission devices (FEDs) may be used to realize a flexible display.
Development of foldable/rollable emitters is required to realize a flexible display using FEDs. Typical flexible emitters are realized by forming an emitter composed of a carbon nanotube (CNT) having EL characteristics on a polymer substrate.
Two conventional methods are used to fabricate a flexible emitter. One method is to grow a carbon material on a seed material formed on a polymer substrate. This method requires forming a seed material, such as iron (Fe), nickel (Ni), cobalt (Co), or Fe—Ni—Co alloy, on a polymer substrate, patterning the seed material into a desired shape of an emitter, and growing EL carbon materials, such as CNTs, on the seed material in a vertical orientation using chemical vapor deposition (CVD).
The other method involves attaching a radical to carbon materials and self-assembling the carbon materials onto a polymer substrate where gold (Au) or silver (Ag) pattern is formed. More specifically, CNTs are dissolved into a solvent containing radicals such as a carboxyl radical (—COOH), and then the polymer substrate, on which Au or Ag has been patterned, is immersed into the resulting solution for a predetermined period. Typically, some radicals, such as the carboxyl group, readily react and combine with the CNTs or metal, such as Ag or Au. Therefore, the radicals within the solution are attached to the ends of the dissolved CNTs and the radicals attached to the CNTs are combined with the metal, such as Ag or Au. Consequently, the CNTs are bonded to Au or Ag through the radicals. When the polymer substrate is removed from the solution, cleaned, and dried, a flexible emitter consisting of CNTs vertically aligned on a metal pattern deposited on the polymer substrate is obtained.
However, the conventional method not only requires numerous steps as described above to position the carbon material on the desired locations but also makes it difficult to uniformly distribute the carbon material over the polymer substrate. To improve field emission characteristics, a separate activation process is required on a completed flexible emitter, i.e., by uniformly cutting an upper end of a CNT. The former method suffers restrictions in growth temperature due to the thermally sensitive polymer when the carbon materials are grown using CVD. Another drawback of the former method is that a multi-walled CNT (MWNT) having a large diameter used as a carbon material grown by CVD exhibits inferior field emission characteristics to a single-walled CNT (SWNT) of a small diameter.
To solve these problems, an approach to apply a carbon material in a paste or slurry form on a metal has been proposed. However, this approach has a drawback in that the carbon material tends to be easily removed and unused during activation due to weak adhesive forces between the carbon material having EL characteristics and the metal. Furthermore, increasing the adhesive force results in severe degradation of field emission characteristics.